She goes back to the kitchen and makes the tea, warming the pot, measuring the leaves carefully, timing the steeping with her big-numbers wristwatch. It was Tony’s mother who taught her about making tea; one of the few useful things she did teach her. Tony has known how to make tea since she was nine. She can remember standing on the kitchen stool, measuring, pouring, carrying the cup upstairs, tenderly balanced, to where her mother was lying in bed under the sheet, a rounded mound, white as a snowdrift. How lovely. Put it there. And finding the cup later, cold, still full.
Begone, Mother, she thinks. Rehtom, enogeb. She banishes her, not for the first time.
West always drinks the tea that Tony makes. He always accepts her offerings. When she goes upstairs with his cup he’s standing by the back window, looking out over the neglected and derelict autumn yard. (Both of them say they will plant things in it, soon, later. Neither of them does.) He’s already dressed: jeans, and a blue sweatshirt that says Scales & Tails and has a turtle on it. Some organization devoted to the saving of amphibians and reptiles, which—Tony imagines—doesn’t have a very large membership, yet. There are so many other things, these days, that require saving.
“Here’s your tea,” she says.
West bends in several places, like a camel sitting down, in order to kiss her. She raises herself on tiptoe.
“Sorry about the garbage,” he says.
“It’s all right,” she says, “it wasn’t heavy. One egg or two?” Once, during the morning garbage race, she tripped on her dressing gown and took a header down the front steps. Luckily she landed on the bag itself, which burst. She didn’t mention= this to West, though. She’s always careful with him. She knows how frangible he is, how subject to breakage.